This invention relates to automated image classification. More specifically, the invention relates to a method and system for identifying and labeling coronary vessels in an angiography sequence.
Coronary angiography is a procedure that uses a contrast material and x-rays to examine blood vessels and/or chambers of the heart. The angiography is an important diagnostic tool in cardiology and facilitates the functional assessment of cardiovascular diseases. During an angiography exam, a catheter is inserted into a blood vessel, the tip of which is positioned either in the heart or at the beginning of the arteries supplying the heart. A contrast medium (or radio opaque dye) is injected, and is outlined by x-ray to produce image sequences referred to herein as runs. A typical angiography study consists of several runs, each run depicting a different vessel seen from a select viewpoint. Each study on average consists of 20-25 runs, with each run consisting on average of 15-120 images, depending on the complexity of the arteries being shown and their associated pathology. A cardiologist reviews the study to detect a constricting of the artery, also known as stenosis.
The two main vessels that are examined during the study are the left coronary artery (LCA) and the right coronary artery (RCA) and their branches. The appearance in images can be quite different due to changes in viewpoint, occlusions, and partial appearances as they become visible or fade away. Reliable recognition of content requires robust modeling of both texture and geometric layout that causes the changes in artery appearance under various conditions.
The analysis of coronary arteries encompasses a large body of work. Most of the work addresses accurate vessel delineation and extracting vessel boundaries and vessel centerline. These methods assume that a given image depicts a vessel structure and not a background image. More specifically, these known methods rely on user interaction to select a segment of interest. Accordingly, the prior art methodologies employ input to identify the subject artery.